SKIP DICKSTEINThe victim of a shooting is taken to Albany Medical Center from behind the an apartment complex at 6 Brevator Street in Albany, N.Y. Feb. 10, 2012. The man was alleged to have been shot by a police officer. (Skip Dickstein / Times Union)

ALBANY — A man authorities described as emotionally disturbed was shot and wounded by police just after noon Friday behind a Brevator Street apartment building across the street from a Catholic elementary and middle school.

The victim, 22-year-old Robert Carter, was shot at least once in the upper torso by an officer summoned to the scene by a 911 call reporting an "emotionally disturbed person" — a law enforcement term for someone behaving erratically and potentially in mental health crisis.

Carter was taken to Albany Medical Center Hospital where he was conscious before undergoing surgery later Friday afternoon, said James Miller, a police department spokesman. Carter was listed in stable condition following the surgery.

The 911 call came from the victim's father at 12:07 p.m., police said.

Police have so far declined to reveal the exact sequence of events that followed other than to say the officers located Carter in the parking area behind 6 Brevator St. The pale yellow building is the rental office for the Campus View Apartments. A confrontation ensued and Carter was shot.

"We're still really early in this investigation," Miller said.

Jaquan Coleman, who lives in the building on the western edge of the Melrose Neighborhood bordering Route 85 and the Harriman State Office Campus, told the Times Union that an officer fired a single shot after ordering the man to drop his own weapon, which Coleman said resembled a BB gun.

Coleman said he saw the weapon on the ground after the shooting. It remained there for a time afterward as evidence technicians marked and measured the scene.

A police officer briefed on the incident, but not authorized to comment publicly, confirmed an officer had ordered Carter to drop the weapon that was pointed at the officer. Carter was holding a BB or pellet gun that looked like a semi-automatic handgun, the officer said. The officer said the incident began when police responded to a 911 call from the victim's father, who lives nearby on Pinehurst Avenue. The father told officers his son was on his way to a Brevator Street residence and had threatened to kill his brother there, the officer said.

Miller confirmed that some kind of weapon had been recovered but declined to elaborate.

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Coleman, who said he watched the incident unfold from his apartment window, said he heard a disturbance before the gunfire and that the man ignored police commands to drop his own weapon and may have fired shots.

"The cops told him to put down his weapon and I guess he wouldn't, so they just shot him," Coleman said. "It looked like he was moving. He had a wound by, like, his stomach."

At the scene, a Taser, a typically non-lethal stun weapon carried by police, could also be seen on the ground with its wires extended near an evidence marker.

In the aftermath of the shooting, school officials moved to secure grounds at All Saints Catholic Academy, the kindergarten to eighth grade school directly across Brevator Street from the scene, at the Western Avenue intersection.

Friday's shooting came less than two months after 19-year-old Nah-Cream Moore was shot and killed by police on South Pearl Street in the city's South End, Albany's first fatal police shooting since 2010.

Moore, who was on parole and a suspect in an armed robbery, was shot after police said he tried to lift a handgun as he scuffled with two officers trying to take him into custody from a stopped SUV the night of Dec. 29.

The investigation into that incident is ongoing, and District Attorney David Soares has said he will present the case to a grand jury, which is standard practice in any fatal police shooting.

Soares' top prosecutor, Chief Assistant District Attorney David Rossi, was at the scene of Friday's shooting.

Miller said the shooting once again underscores the peril police face on a daily basis.

"The officers, what they do, their lives are in danger every day," he said.

Susan Paigo, 58, was in her neighboring apartment building, one of seven nearly identical apartment houses on that stretch of Brevator, when she heard gunfire.

"I knew they were gunshots immediately," Paigo said. "I came flying out of my apartment. Police everywhere, that's all I saw."